For each child had its room--except Jimmie and Johnnie, who shared one.
And each room was the fortress of an egoism, the theatre of a separate
drama, mysterious, and sacred from the others. Jimmie could not
remember having been in Janet's room--it was forbidden by Alicia, who
was jealous of her sole right of entree--and nobody would have dreamed
of violating the chamber of Jimmie and Johnnie to discover the origin of
peculiar noises that puzzled the household at seven o'clock in the
morning. As for Tom's castle--it was a legend to the younger children;
it was supposed to be wondrous.
All the children had always cost money, and a great deal of money, until
Marian had left the family in deep gloom for her absence, and Tom, with
a final wrench of a vast sum from the willing but wincing father, had
settled into a remunerative profession. Tom was now keeping himself and
repaying the weakened parent. The rest cost more and more every year as
their minds and bodies budded and flowered. It was endless, it was
staggering, it would not bear thinking about. The long and varied
chronicle of it was somehow written on the drawing-room as well as on
the faces of the father and mother--on the drawing-room which had the
same dignified, childlike, indefatigable, invincible, jolly expression
as its owners. Threadbare in places? And why not? The very identical
Turkey carpet at which Edwin gazed in his self-consciousness--on that
carpet Janet the queenly and mature had sprawled as an infant while her
mother, a fresh previous Janet of less than thirty, had cooed and said
incomprehensible foolishness to her. Tom was patriarchal because he had
vague memories of an earlier drawing-room, misted in far antiquity.
Threadbare? By heaven, its mere survival was magnificent! I say that
it was a miraculous drawing-room. Its chairs were humanised. Its
little cottage piano that nobody ever opened now unless Tom had gone mad
on something for two pianos, because it was so impossibly tinny--the
cottage piano could humanly recall the touch of a perfect baby when
Marian the wife sat down to it. Marian was one of your silly
sentimental nice things; on account of its associations, she really
preferred the cottage piano to the grand. The two carpets were both
resigned, grim old humanities, used to dirty heels, and not caring, or
pretending not to care. What did the curtains know of history? Naught.
They were always new; they could not last. But even the newest
curtains would at once submit to the influence of the room, and take on
something of its physiognomy, and help to express its comfortableness.
You could not hang a week in front of one of those windows without being
subtly informed by the tradition of adventurous happiness that presided
over the room. It was that: a drawing-room in which a man and a woman,
and boys and girls, had been on the whole happy, if often apprehensive.
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